The Orphaned Worlds

by Michael Cobley

  ‘Rosa …!’ he snarled as he snatched out his beam pistol and cut a swath through the ghastly mêlée to the ragged hole. Beneath was another tunnel so he jumped down and was immediately startled by a group of tentacles suddenly battering themselves against the transparent membrane that formed one side of this passage. Against an odd, pale green luminescence, the membrane was translucent with patches of opacity, and also bore a large, flapping tear next to which Robert found one of Rosa’s little holoprojectors.

  ‘Rosa,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me? Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, Father, I am … unwounded. Are you in the tunnel below?’

  ‘At the moment, yes. Was it one of these ferocious tentacles that grabbed you?’

  ‘It’s a feeder arm, I think. It grabs food and drops it into an enclosure full of Achorga larvae.’

  ‘My God, is that where you are now?’

  ‘I managed to get out, and I’m looking for a way down to the egg chambers which are usually arranged concentrically around the Hive queen throne room. If you follow that passage it will take you to a split-level intersection near one of the main aisles into the throne room. I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Rose, I found one of your holoprojectors.’

  ‘I knew I was missing one, Father. If you press the little stud on either of yours, you will find that you now have independent control. Now, you had better get moving.’

  ‘Right. See you soon.’

  He spent the next ten minutes negotiating the downward, undulating tubeway, thankfully without hazardous interruption, apart from sidestepping another stream of minor symbiotes. Reaching an opening, he paused to peer down. Bioluminescence streaked rough walls as if daubed there, while a similar glow came from knobbly, milky ropes that snaked all around the intersection. Rounded ramps and walkways linked most of the openings to each other and the floor, and a couple of flimsy-looking gantries spanned the gap. Here was where Rosa said she would be, so it was just a question of whether to stay here or use the holocloak and sidle round to another minor opening with a better view …

  Suddenly he realised that the pickup on his neck and the bead in his ear were getting warm. No, not warm but hot – hastily he backed away from the opening while tearing off the pickup and yanking the red-hot bead from his ear. Letting them fall to the ground, he leaned against the wall, wincing as he gingerly touched neck and ear. Next thing he knew, a diminutive figure rushed out of the shadows, scooped up his comm devices then dived back into the gloom.

  ‘Hey!’ he cried, stumbling after the thief.

  By the feeble glow of his redlamp Robert almost tripped over the short fellow just as he raised a stone and smashed the devices into tiny glittering fragments.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The creature scuttled off to the side, muttering to itself.

  ‘Human … Human-Human … Human-Anglic … yes, Human-Anglic is … is!’

  Then it lunged towards him and grabbed his arm. ‘Come! – we go. We go now. Vilorga are awake, vilorga can smell transmittings, vilorga are hunting you and the other one! I know of place of safety – come, now …’

  The strange creature tugged on his arm, half-crouching in the glow of his redlamp, its neat, small-featured face, short, all-over fur and slender lithe frame presenting a form too familiar for coincidence.

  ‘Are you a Uvovo?’ he said. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Am I … ?’ The small face was startled, wide eyes darting side to side. ‘Ah, remember, recall. My people, the Rivovo, not Uvovo. I am called Taklos. Now, we go.’

  Half in curiosity, half in fear of being lost and cut off, Robert let the Rivovo Taklos lead him round the intersection’s upper slope to another tunnel which wound and twisted downwards. It wore a plain, grubby shiftlike garment and although Robert was uncertain of its gender, he decided to think of the Rivovo as a he. Taklos muttered and mumbled continuously, sometimes in Anglic, other times in a profusion of languages, of which Robert recognised a few. Thus he learned the names of some of the insectoid symbiotes and heard Taklos talk of several dangerous Achorga variants like the Lysorga which could wrap its quarry in narcotising webs, or the Jikorga which could disable or kill with acid spit, or the Marorga which could deliver a lethal shock through long spines.

  Robert recognised a couple of these from historical accounts of the Swarm War, and from vee and Glow dramas. He just hoped and prayed never to encounter any of them.

  Sure enough, they had just reached a low-roofed, poorly lit chamber when Robert heard a rapid thudding coming from a wider tunnel leading off. A moment later a full-grown, bull-sized Achorga rushed into the chamber, slowed and approached them. At once the Rivovo bent over and began to make a strange wavering moaning sound, cupping his hands around his mouth to focus it on the restless, oddly indecisive creature. Robert felt weirdly calm, despite being possibly the first Human to get this close to one of these things in a century and a half.

  I wonder where Rosa is, he thought. She would have some good advice for this situation, I’m sure.

  Then the Achorga seemed to lose interest as it turned away and hurried off up another exit. Robert almost sagged with relief.

  ‘Safety is this way,’ said Taklos, indicating an oval passage that sloped up, a yellowish glow some way along. ‘Getting close to halls of Empress – keep feet and mouth quiet.’

  The yellow glow brightened as they drew near. Surreptitiously Robert checked his beam pistol, not sure if he should be trusting the Rivovo so completely. Then they came out in a sweet-smelling grove of small trees with shiny dark green leaves and low-hanging reddish-orange pods. This was a medium-sized chamber with a high ceiling, a kind of grass underfoot and the sound of water trickling in the undergrowth somewhere.

  ‘This is a surprising place to find underground, Taklos,’ he said, reaching for the detector to see how near he was to the Zyradin. ‘I wonder if you can help me find …’

  Glancing round, his voice trailed off. The Rivovo’s face was slack and twitching as the tapered end of something membranous, something grey and slick, wriggled away into a now-visible slit in Taklos’s neck. Abruptly, the Rivovo stood straighter and his eyes stared levelly at Robert.

  ‘Humaniform subject,’ he said. ‘Earthsphere, Earth, the Grand Exodus, the many Battles Glorious, ah, we remember …’

  ‘Taklos, what are you saying … ?’ ‘This one only an intermediary, although sometimes we steer him, enjoy bipedal intrinsicality when we tire of the Achorga modes …’

  ‘Who is “we”?’

  ‘Guides, pilots, advisers, mentors,’ said the thing inside Taklos. ‘Choose.’

  This is some kind of mind parasite, Robert thought, curious despite the menacing situation. ‘So why did he bring me here?’

  ‘Poor Taklos thought to barter you for his release, his freedom to leave.’ A shake of the head. ‘Unfortunately, his biology was altered long ago, longevity, cellular resistance, blood acclimatisation – if he left the confines of the hive he would be dead in a single sky-cycle.’

  ‘How long ago was he altered?’

  ‘Hundreds of Earth years, at least a thousand.’

  Robert frowned at this, then noticed that some of the pods near the possessed Rivovo were extruding thin, pale grey tongues which wavered as they lengthened. Glancing round he saw others protruding from pods close by. He shifted his position slightly.

  ‘We need you to stay,’ the Rivovo said.

  Calmly, Robert took out the beamer pistol. ‘Your offer is most kind but sadly I have other more pressing matters to attend to.’

  The possessed creature gave a grotesque, gaping smile as it saw the weapon.

  ‘What exceptional Construct handiwork,’ it said. ‘You …’

  There was a cluster of sharp hisses and three dark marks appeared on the Rivovo’s neck. It jerked in surprise, tried to speak then slumped to the floor. All around the sinister grey tongues retracted back into their pods. Robert looked round to see Rosa appear from a pr
eviously unseen doorway, flechette carbine in hand.

  ‘This way,’ she said.

  Keeping his distance from the pods, he followed her out to a narrow tunnel which led steeply upwards.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Robert said. ‘What were those things?’ ‘Those things are Sarsheni, Father, and if I’d killed that host creature while one was inside it, every other Sarsheni in the hive would have felt its psi-death, which is why I used knockout flechettes.’

  Robert was astonished and horrified. The Sarsheni were a psi-parasitic species that had ruled the vast Indroma domains for nearly ten millennia. It had been thought that the Sarsheni were wiped out in the Bargalil revolution, so their presence here was a profoundly disturbing discovery. When he voiced such worries Rosa agreed.

  ‘It makes the success of our mission still more imperative,’ she said. ‘The Construct must be informed.’

  As she consulted the detector, Robert went over some of what the Sarsheni said – Earth, the Grand Exodus, the many Battles Glorious, ah, we remember … Which almost implied that those creatures were around at the time of the Swarm War, or were even involved …

  Rosa snapped shut the detector’s cover and looked up. ‘When we were separated, I found some disused passages behind a wall built over the underground remnants of the original city. They lead down and straight towards the Zyradin trace. I’ve made sure of the route we need to take – we should reach our destination quite soon.’

  Trusting to this, Robert followed only to discover that Rosa had omitted to mention that said route led along a wall gallery overlooking the Empress’s birthing hall. Several times they had to pause and activate their holocloaks as smaller, paler Achorga hurried past with clusters of glistening eggs fastened to their backs with sticky strands. Once, Robert paused to steal a glance out at the hall and saw scores of red Achorga crawling all over a huge, lopsided spiral dais. Only when he saw a line of apertures along one spiral level suddenly squeeze out small white eggs, one after another, did he realise it was no dais.

  With that grotesque image fixed in his mind, he hurried after Rosa.

  Some fifteen minutes later, in a secluded corner of the hive’s lowest levels, they clambered through a hole Rosa had mentioned making. A musty-smelling passage with walls of irregular stone curved round to a low, square room with another three doorways. Two were blocked by age-old cave-ins, but the third led to a downward slope of shallow steps. Up till now they had been lighting the way with their redlamps but as they descended the stepped ramp they saw a pale, wan glow coming from below. Some minutes later the ramp emerged into shadowy open space, and Robert’s eyes widened at the sight.

  The ramp had been cut from the rough wall of an immense cavern whose heights and far end were lost in shadows and haze. The dark mirrored surface of a placid underground lake almost filled it, covering all except a thin strip of dry higher ground that ran around the edge. The craggy ceiling dipped in many places, forming here and there complete columns of knobbly pale rock that reached to the floor. Pendulous rock formations served as anchor points for webs and masses of foliage whose stalks, tubers and tendril meshes gave off a pearly radiance. That, however, was outshone by the forest that they paused to survey.

  Dense thickets of slender pale trees formed a tangled forest on a broad island at the centre of the lake. From their higher elevation, Robert could see that many other plant-forms were intertwined with the trees: bushes and creepers, long grasses, crooked stalks holding odd translucent cones aloft, clusters of glassy orbs and outbreaks of bulbous fungi. It was these rather than the trees whose radiant luminosity reached into all but the most shadowy of corners.

  Rosa had her detector out – she smiled and pointed at the forest. ‘The secondary particle source is at the centre.’

  They continued down to the foot of the slope then along to a narrow neck of ground, one of several that connected the outer shore to the island forest. The air was warm and humid and numerous clouds of insects hung over the still waters. The closer they came, the more Robert noticed the faint colours of the vegetation, delicate blues, limpid yellows, gauzy pinks. This all combined to give the underground lake and forest a mysterious and pleasing lustre, a kind of immaculate tranquillity. Once at the island they pushed on through the pale, luminescent foliage, and Robert smiled to himself, remembering some of the stories his mother told him when he was very young, tales of brave knights venturing across wastelands and into forests on the trail of treasure or a princess or the Holy Grail.

  And here we are, he thought. Strange knights in search of a stranger grail.

  Finally they reached the heart of the pale forest, a clearing with a pool, dark and undisturbed. Detector in hand, Rosa walked over and stopped at the edge.

  ‘There are secondary particle readings all around,’ she said. ‘But they are concentrated here.’

  ‘So now you set up the container and it draws the Zyradin to it, yes?’

  Rosa nodded, took a flat object from inside a midriff pocket and tugged a plastic strip away from its edge. Immediately it expanded and filled out into a dark grey cylinder as long as his lower arm. The lid was a disc peeled from the cylinder’s base. It grew rigid in seconds.

  ‘The cylinder is designed to emit a specific pattern of subsonic frequencies,’ Rosa said. ‘The Zyradin responds by converging on the subsonic source and compressing itself into the container …’

  OR NOT

  The voice was quiet, speaking in near-accentless Anglic, and sounded as if it was coming from nearby, yet all around, like a chorus of many voices. Robert exchanged a look with Rosa, who seemed both puzzled and amused.

  ‘Who are we speaking with?’ she asked.

  WHO DO YOU SEEK YOU SEEK AN IT BUT I AM AN I THE GREAT DESIGNERS CREATED AN IT FOR THE WORK OF WAR AFTERWARDS, THE IT CHANGED OVER THE LONG AND MANY YEARS AS IF TIME ITSELF WAS THE SOIL FOR IT TO GROW IN AND IT BECAME I I AM HAPPY HERE WHY SHOULD I LEAVE

  ‘Because the work of war is not done,’ said Robert. ‘Because powerful forces are trying to set free your ancient enemy, the Legion of Avatars. Because if we fail worlds will burn and countless billions will die. Because the Construct sent us to find a Zyradin, a counterpart for the world-forest known as Segrana, in the hope that the worst can be avoided.’

  Rosa gave him an approving look.

  AH, THE CONSTRUCT THAT EXPLAINS A GREAT DEAL THE CRISIS MUST BE ABOUT TO BLOOM VERY WELL, I SHALL ACCOMPANY YOU

  Taken aback, Robert glanced at Rosa, who seemed equally surprised.

  ‘You change your mind quickly,’ said Robert.

  I MIGHT HAVE TAKEN MORE TIME TO CONSIDER YOUR REQUEST EXCEPT THAT THE ACHORGA HUNTERS THAT YOU FOOLISHLY LED HERE WILL SOON ARRIVE MAKE READY YOUR CONTAINER PUT IT IN THE POOL

  Quickly, Rosa placed the lidless cylinder in the water at the edge of the pool. A moment later tiny bright motes began rising from its depths, like glowing beads with a trailing, electric-blue aura, or the stylised image of a comet. Or eyes …

  ‘The orchestra of eyes,’ he muttered.

  THE FANCIFUL NAME BESTOWED ON THE ZYRADIN BY EBRINALDR ESISK, THE HIGH SCIENTIST LORD WHO DESIGNED US

  ‘Is there another way out of here?’ said Rosa.

  THERE IS IT MAY NOT LEAD YOU BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED FROM HOWEVER

  Now the pool was actually glowing from the hundreds of motes that were converging on the container, pouring into it. As Robert watched, more began appearing at the edge of the pool, as if entering from the surrounding ground. Still they kept appearing or ascending from the depths, funnelling together into the open cylinder, thousands of them.

  How is this possible? he wondered. Unless the actual physical component is a lot smaller than it appears …

  Suddenly the myriads thinned out to a stream and dwindled to nothing.

  YOU MAY NOW AFFIX A SEAL

  In one smooth movement Rosa retrieved the dripping cylinder and attached the lid with an audible click. At the same time Robert heard a thrumming rushing coming t
hrough the pale forest.

  ‘Time we were leaving,’ he said.

  GO AROUND THE POOL AND THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FOREST CROSS THE WATER AND GO TO THE NARROW END OF THE GREAT CAVE AT THE HEAD OF THE DESCENDING STAIRS THERE, CLIMB ON THE STONE LEDGE BEHIND THE PILLAR ON THE LEFT IS A DOORWAY GO THROUGH AND FOLLOW THE PASSAGE DOWN

  They followed the Zyradin’s instructions to the letter and, sure enough, the hidden doorway was where it said it was. Cradling the Zyradin’s cylinder, Rosa hefted her flechette carbine in her other hand and stepped through. Robert paused to peer back at the lake and its forest island. The dense, pale tangles seemed to have lost some of their spectral lustre. The luminescence was dimmed and the shadows were taller and darker. As he watched, a few Achorga emerged from the vegetation. Quickly he withdrew behind the pillar and went after Rosa.

  Stone stairs descended the sides of a square shaft, the steps deep yet worn and rounded. Every footfall raised a puff of dust and every cold breath was tainted by the smell of ancient decay. Had the original civilisation of this world built all these subsur-face areas, and if so why? Occasionally he slowed to peer over the brink but there was only an impenetrable darkness that gave no sense of depth. What, he wondered, would drive a society to burrow down so far?

  Red lamplight revealed no patterns or lettering, no marks or decoration of any kind, which was somewhat atypical. After nearly twenty minutes he was starting to question inwardly how this escape route could possibly lead back to the surface. He was about to voice his doubts when Rosa stopped and turned, eyes wide.

  ‘Quiet,’ she said.

  For a moment, nothing. Then a sharp ticking and clicking far above, swiftly growing louder. Then a rushing sound and a dark shadowy form that fell past them. In the red gloom few details were apparent but a glimpse of thrashing insectoid limbs told them all they needed to know. A few seconds later they heard an echoing thud.

  ‘They’ve found the concealed door,’ Robert said.

  NOW YOU MUST HURRY THERE ARE NINE MORE FLIGHTS TO GO